March 14, 2004
The Observer (UK)

How We Survived Guantanamo Hell

by David Rose

'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at the side of the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine.

'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get on ordinary lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our chests, and almost immediately we started to suffocate. We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.'

In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was describing his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, after a massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan - the start of a 26-month nightmare which ended last week with their release from the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke softly, still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just can't believe we're sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, we were in the cages at Guantanamo.'

The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, there will be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their allegations - which, it can be assumed, America is likely to deny - cannot be corroborated. However, many of the experiences they describe, including gunpoint interrogations in Afghanistan and random brutality both there and in Guantanamo, have been related in identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October I spent four days at Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say about the regime and the camp's physical conditions I either saw or heard from US officials.

Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured near-starvation in a jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. When the Red Cross appeared and promised to make contact with the British Embassy in Islamabad they thought they were going home. Instead, with the apparent agreement of British officials, they were handed over to the Americans, first for weeks of physical abuse at a detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two years in the desolation of Guantanamo.

Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a time, by American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, they say, they endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to freedom on Wednesday after two final days of questioning at Paddington Green police station, every apparent shred of evidence had melted away.

. . . of the 35,000 originally marched through the desert, only 4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this time they could see American troops 50 metres from their prison wing on the other side of the gates. . . .

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VIDEO: "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death," ACFTV, February 4, 2003

"Unjust, Unwise, UnAmerican," Economist, July 10, 2003

Tania Branigan, "Lawyer chosen by Pentagon says detainees face unfair trial," The Guardian, March 25, 2004

Editorial: "Capt. Yee's Muzzle," The Washington Post, April 18, 2004

Luke Harding, "'It's hell...everything will be destroyed': Military accused of violating Falluja ceasefire," The Guardian, April 30, 2004

John Hendren, "Officials Say Rumsfeld OKd Harsh Interrogation Methods," Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2004

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantanamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.--Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush," New York Times, June 8, 2004

[Detainees held in Afghanistan by US troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process in the same way as those in Iraq,--Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg, "US tortured Afghanistan detainees," Guardian, June 23, 2004]

[Declaring that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president," the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that those deemed enemy combatants by the Bush administration, both in the United States and at Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba, must be given the ability to challenge their detention before a judge or other "neutral decision-maker."--Linda Greenhouse, "Justices Affirm Legal Rights of 'Enemy Combatants'," New York Times, June 29, 2004]

Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know," Chelsea Green Publishing Company (June 30, 2004)

Andrew Buncombe, "Guantanamo's military trials are condemned as grossly unfair," Independent, August 23, 2004

Oliver Burkeman, "Bush team 'knew of abuse' at Guant‡namo," Guardian, September 13, 2004

Carol D. Leonnig and John Mintz, "Judge Says Detainees' Trials Are Unlawful," Washington Post, November 9, 2004

Erik Saar and Viveca Novak, "Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo," Penguin Press (May 2, 2005)

James Yee and Aimee Molloy, "For God And Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," PublicAffairs (October, 2005)

Moazzam Begg and Victoria Brittain, "Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar," New Press (September 11, 2006)

Paul Willis, "FBI report lists Guantanamo abuse," Telegraph, January 3, 2007